Sales and reviews The book received critical acclaim, winning two
NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers' Prize) earned positive reviews in other media, and, with the highest number of nominations by members of the public, was chosen to be the first book discussed in the inaugural meeting of the Parliamentary Book Club. A new edition was published in 2018. By mid 2021 the book had sold 250,000 copies.
Praise Historian
Bill Gammage, whose 2012 work
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia influenced
Dark Emu, praised Pascoe's gift for weaving a narrative that challenges many readers' preconceptions. He admired the book for its impact, but added that Pascoe sometimes romanticises pre-contact Indigenous society, and his claims that
Stone Age Indigenous people invented
democracy and baking may be "push[ing] these things too far". admired
Dark Emu's achievement in popularising ideas that challenged European Australians' cultural preconceptions. Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, a researcher in cultural history at the
University of Western Australia, said that
Dark Emu "provides the most concerted attempt [yet] to answer the question about the quality of the country ... in the pre-colonial epoch", and that the book's strengths lie in "its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology". Writer
Gregory Day, writes that Pascoe's book connects with general readers because "he knows what it feels like to be a
whitefella – in a sense, Bruce is translating it for this whitefellas".
Debate and criticism Pascoe's book has been extensively debated in Australian media and political spheres. Several academics have criticised Pascoe's claim that since 1880 scholars have suppressed accounts of sophisticated housing and food and environmental management practices in traditional Aboriginal societies.
Peter Hiscock, chair of archaeology at
Sydney University, archaeologist
Harry Lourandos, who documented the construction of
eel traps in
Victoria in the 1970s, and Ian McNiven of
Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre all agree that there is a large body of published work on the topic. However, Lourandos and McNiven are delighted at the book's success in reaching the broader public. Historians Lynette Russell and
Billy Griffiths wrote that Pascoe had drawn together an enormous amount of
ethnographic evidence showing that Aboriginal peoples "were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers"; however, they challenge the implicit
Eurocentric idea that agriculture is the result of "progress" on a continuum from hunter-gathering, or that such an evolutionary hierarchy exists. They argue Western terminology lacks nuance, and "Communities have shifted between these categories and moved back and forth as suited their needs". James Boyce echoes this view: "The 'progress' inherent to a move from foraging to farming has been questioned by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists for more than 50 years ... there was rarely a sharp line between farming and hunter-gatherer ways of life". anthropologist
Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe suggest that
Dark Emu devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer
socio-economic system. They also criticise the work on grounds of being poorly researched, not fully sourced, and selective in its choice and emphasis of the facts. In James Boyce's opinion, their most salient criticisms include that Pascoe uses white explorers' journals, ignoring the knowledge of Aboriginal sources, and also that he generalises from local examples and claims incorrectly that such technologies were used across the continent. However, he is also critical of some aspects of Sutton and Walshe's work.
Warrimay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams, also in
The Australian, calls
Dark Emu a scandal and a
hoax, and expresses deep concerns in the Aboriginal community about the story Pascoe is telling, saying that her family were not farmers, but proud of being hunter–gatherers. After
Pauline Hanson's One Nation MP
Mark Latham proposed in the
New South Wales Parliament in June 2021 that the book should be banned from use by teachers in NSW schools (where it is not part of the curriculum, but available as an historical source for critical discussion), his motion had little support. The
Minister for Indigenous Australians,
Ken Wyatt, later commented that he welcomed "more people taking the time to read
Dark Emu and consulting Mr Pascoe’s references to verify or disprove his assertions as we do with various academic studies or research ... What’s important here is that we are open to hearing other people’s perspectives, contemplating and genuinely engaging in working constructively together to reconcile our understandings". ==Awards and accolades==